Activity #8

Activity #8

After first reading and then talking to people, I surprised me how much I, and the people that I talked to, didn’t know about violence against women. I always knew such violence existed but I never knew how prevalent it was. The statistics that were giving in the book were very surprising to me, and others. When starting my conversations with people, I shared with them the many statistics. A few such statistics were that ever 2 minutes in the U.S., a sexual assault is reported and “approximately 56 women are victimized in some why by an intimate partner every hour.” Another one is that one in five highschool girls report being sexually or physically abused by their boyfriend. I also told them that one in three women will experience sexual assault at one point in their life, and of the women who are sexually assaulted 9 in 10 knew their the person who assaulted them. When it comes to physical abuse, women are 5 to 8 times more likely to be a victim than men are.
After telling the people I was interviewing these things, I talked to them about how they thought about it. The overall response I got was that they did not know how bad this kind of violence really was today, especially the men that I interviewed. The women I spoke to I guess knew that kind of stuff goes on but the statistics surprised them. None of them had any personal stories to tell about this topic. They think the cause of violence against women is the fact that men are usually seen as the “dominant” gender and the reason violence against women is so much higher than against men is because violence and sexual assault is about being dominant over someone else and having power. Therefore, females are an easy target. The general response across the board to what we can do to help eliminate this is to inform people and educate people about it, then let people know where they can go to get help if they need it. Overall, my response is the same as everyone I interviewed: surprised by the statistics because I did not realize the severity of this problem today. I believe that this kind of information should be a lot more places so as to educate other people and to let people know that there is help out there. We need to bring this problem to a stop before it gets any worse.